By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Jonathan Franzen, Sherman Alexie, Andre Dubus and more.

Doug McLean

When I talked to Aimee Bender, author of The Color Master, for this series, she mentioned a recent article in the journal Science that suggested reading fiction changes one’s orientation towards the world. When it compared popular fiction, literary fiction, nonfiction, and reading nothing at all, the Science study found that literary fiction temporarily increases what researches call “theory of mind”: emotional intelligence, essentially. It’s not hyperbole, then, to say “This book changed my life”—literature demonstrably boosts one’s ability to understand, relate to, and empathize with others.

How strange—and yet how unsurprising, to people who love novels—that reading causes perceptible changes to our brains and bodies. (It sounds like something out of an Aimee Bender story, actually—like the dessert served in The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake that briefly allows the narrator to hold the full psychic weight of her mother’s secret history.) In her conversation for this series, Bender shared the story of her own such transformation. Memorizing a mysterious Wallace Stevens poem, Bender experienced much more than the pleasure of learning words by heart—the poem worked a real, physiological magic that surprises her to this day.

The Color Master blends psychological realism and fairytale fabulism in the balance she is known for: Women marry child-eating ogres, tigers have their stripes sewn on, girls learn to make dye just the color of the moon. Aimee Bender teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California. She spoke to me by phone from her home in Los Angeles.

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

Aimee Bender: I first heard “The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” at a funeral. A large funeral, and a very sad one. A poet read it to the people gathered, and I found it moving, and helpful, but in a kind of inexplicable way. It’s something of an oblique poem. It concerns mystery, and its language is itself mysterious. Yet there was something in it that I sensed, even listening for the first time, about a community coming together to support this family and pay tribute to this life.

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The poet knew Stevens’s poem very well—it was like it had metabolized in her. She’d absorbed it fully in a way that helped us absorb it, too. I felt that magical alchemy of poetry, the way it acknowledges things we can’t fully understand. I felt very sad about the death that had happened, but there a healing line from this poet to the people sitting around.

Right away, I knew I’d want to look that poem up and spend more time with it. One line—“We say God and the imagination are one”—stuck with me especially. There’s something beautifully enigmatic about that line: It contains what feels so expansive and mysterious about the imagination to me. I love the way it treats the imagination with an almost-religious reverence.

A friend of mine, the Tin House editor Cheston Knapp, wrote an essay once where he recalled memorizing a Frost poem as a younger man—he was making fun of himself, calling out the pretentiousness of this. And it’s funny, because I found myself thinking: I want to do that. Not in a showy way. I don’t want to perform a poem. I just like the idea of having the words accessible in my mind. I love poetry, and I wanted to carry Stevens’s poem with me. To live with it. I’d never been required to memorize anything before—the days of learning poems by heart in school are gone—and suddenly, I wanted to.

It took a while for me to learn the words, which I’d repeat to myself while driving in L. A. Trying to speak a poem over and over, you learn to pay attention to all its nooks and crannies: I had to ask myself, is it “a” or “the?” Is the phrase “miraculous influence,” or something else? You have to slow down so intensely to read a poem and take it all in. As I tried to digest it, chew over all its details, I started to feel the way the lines flowed into one another. I started to understand it through its shape.

When I spoke the poem, just as when I heard it, I could feel something happening within.

Here’s what surprised me: When I had it all memorized, I felt elated. I had a physical response to holding all those words in my mind together. A real buzz—that was shocking to me. But it also makes sense because it was the same thing that happened to me at the funeral: Hearing the poem aloud, it had this certain physical magic that I recognized. Speaking it aloud, the same powerful feeling came through. When I spoke the poem, just as when I heard it, I could feel something happening within.

The poem’s meaning shifted for me, too. The line I’d liked so much at first, “We say God and the imagination are one,” began to seem darker. I started to feel it was acknowledging human limitation, addressing the way we invent things to comfort ourselves. That’s when the next line rose up, a line I’d completely overlooked when reading on the page: “How high that highest candle lights the dark.”

This image is expansion and limit all at once. Stevens has just told us that our largest, most expansive thoughts are still contained within us, that our sense of God or something larger exists only within our minds. We feel there’s something larger but, no—that’s in our minds. Yet this idea turns again with “how high that highest candle lights the dark”: Even within our human limitations, how beautiful we can be. It’s still just a little candle, but how high: our beauty, our capacity for thought and feeling, for togetherness. Our humanness is vast and ripe and gorgeous, and, as Stevens says at the end of the poem, “being there together is enough.” Even though he’s struggling with the nature of what we imagine, the poem ultimately enters a place where connection is possible between people. Ultimately, I think it’s a hopeful poem in that way.

Part of the reason the memorization appealed to me is I felt like I want these lines available to me at certain times of my life—if something is difficult, or something is joyous, I want to feel like I have access to words that will help me think about and express what I’m feeling. And the more the better. We can be so vague in our memory of books. Paragraphs that we loved become slippery, then gone. Memorization was a way for me to force myself to be more precise, and to forge a more permanent relationship to the words. It allowed a certain kind of magical construction to get in my mind and simmer there. The work of tinkering with the language it’s that exquisite, that well-wrought, is so exciting—it reminds you what art can do. I had a physical reaction. I felt caffeinated. And that feeling lasted for a long time.

When language is treated beautifully and interestingly, it can feel good for the bodY: It’s nourishing, it’s rejuvenating.

Granted, I’m someone who loves words. I’ve always loved poetry—so it’s suited to me. But I still was shocked by the poem’s palpable effect on me. I think we’re biologically impacted by language. It can be deeply, deeply nourishing. And I don’t mean that as a metaphor. It can feel like something cellular gets fed. When language is treated beautifully and interestingly, it can feel good for the body: It’s nourishing, it’s rejuvenating. This is not the way we typically think about literature, which tend to talk about as taking place inside the head—even if it’s the emotional part of the head. To feel energized by Stevens was a singular experience that reminded me how words register in our physical bodies, too. It felt like concrete proof that literature is important.

I was talking once to David Wilson who curates the Museum of Jurassic Technology here [in Los Angeles]. He said, “I don’t know why not knowing where a story is going is nourishing, but it is.” I love that—because it’s true. When I don’t know where a story is going, I feel better—I physically feel better, after not knowing and then being surprised. Language, when it’s that worked-through, is such a gift. The human being needs language, and the human being needs language to be treated well—not just with easy, throw-away sentences. Skimming and reading constantly and reading lightly is not enough. Slow down: It’s good for the brain. Memorizing Stevens forced me to slow down. It was nice to realize, I can turn off the radio as I drive. I can say these poems aloud, and see what they do.

I draw this same physical nourishment from my own work, too, at times. If I write something that I’m happy about, it means the language is clicking in some way that will sustain me for weeks. Sometimes, one good paragraph can keep me going through weeks of bad paragraphs, all the writing that feels like walking through sludge.

And it’s interesting that the writing I tend to think of as “good” is good because it’s mysterious. It tends to happen when I get out of the way–-when I let it go a little bit, I surprise myself. I feel most pleased with my language when I don’t understand it completely. When it sustains hope that there’s more to write about, that there’s an open door for me to explore. That’s when the writing gets really fun. I feel like it’s all about waiting for a kind of discovery that takes place on the sentence level—as opposed to having a light-bulb about a character. That’s the thing that drives me from first sentence to last sentence.

I know my own writing is working when I feel like there’s something hovering beneath the verbal, that mysterious emotional place.

Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language. If you write a page a day for 30 days, and you pick the parts where the language is working, plot and character will start to emerge organically. For me, plot and character emerge directly from the word—as opposed to having a light-bulb about a character or event. I just don’t work like that. Though I know some writers do, I can’t. I’ll think, oh I have an insight about the character, and when I’ll sit down to write, it feels extremely imposed and last for two minutes. I find I can write for two lines and then I have nothing else to say. For me, the only way to find something comes through the sentence level, and sticking with the sentences that give a subtle feeling that there’s something more to say. This means I’ve hit on something unconscious enough to write about—something with enough unknown in there to be brought out. On some level I can sense that, and it keeps me going.

That’s why I love Stevens’s poem, too—it sits between these great mysteries that he’s articulated without dispelling them completely. Some of those mysteries clarify, but they’re not all going to clarify. I think a good poem will always stay a little mysterious. The best writing does. The words that click into place, wrap around something mysterious. They create a shape around which something lives—and they give hints about what that thing is, but do not reveal it fully. That’s the thing I want to do in my own writing: present words that act as a vessel for something more mysterious. I know it’s working when I feel like there’s something hovering beneath it the verbal, that mysterious emotional place that Stevens wrote about.

Language is limited, it’s a faulty tool. But how high it lights the dark.

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In the landscape where Mad Max: Fury Road was filmed, a scientist is trying to understand a natural phenomenon that has eluded explanation for decades.

One evening earlier this spring, German naturalist Norbert Jürgens strayed from his expedition in the Namib Desert. He walked away from his campsite beside Leopard Rock, a huge pile of schist slabs stacked like left-over roofing tiles, and into a vast plain ringed with red-burnished hills. He had 20 minutes of light left before sunset, and he intended to use them.

This next part may sound like a reenactment from a nature documentary, but trust me: This is how it went down.

Off by himself, Jürgens dropped down to his knees. He sank his well-tanned arms in the sand up to the elbows. As he rooted around, he told me later, he had a revelation.

At the time, I was watching from the top of Leopard Rock, which offered a bird’s-eye view of both Jürgens and his expedition’s quarry. Across the plain, seemingly stamped into its dry, stubbly grass, were circles of bare ground, each about the size of an aboveground pool. Jürgens, a professor at the University of Hamburg, was digging—and pondering—in one of these bare patches.

The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem.

1. The Aristocracy Is Dead …

For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan.

The 9-year-old has built a huge following with profane Instagram posts, but the bravado of “the youngest flexer of the century” masks a sadder tale about fame and exploitation.

In mid-February, a mysterious 9-year-old by the name of Lil Tay began blowing up on Instagram.

“This is a message to all y’all broke-ass haters, y’all ain't doing it like Lil Tay,” she shouts as she hops into a red Mercedes, hands full of wads of cash. “This is why all y’all fucking haters hate me, bitch. This shit cost me $200,000. I’m only 9 years old. I don’t got no license, but I still drive this sports car, bitch. Your favorite rapper ain’t even doing it like Lil Tay.”

Referring to herself as “the youngest flexer of the century,” Lil Tay quickly garnered a fan base of millions, including big name YouTubers who saw an opportunity to capitalize on her wild persona. In late January, RiceGum, an extremely influential YouTube personality dedicated an entire roast video to Lil Tay.

The text reflected not only the president’s signature syntax, but also the clash between his desire for credit and his intuition to walk away.

Donald Trump’s approach to North Korea has always been an intensely personal one—the president contended that his sheer force of will and negotiating prowess would win the day, and rather than use intermediaries, he planned for a face-to-face meeting, with himself and Kim Jong Un on either side of a table.

So Trump’s notice on Thursday that he was canceling the June 12 summit in Singapore was fitting. It arrived in the form of a letter that appears to have been written by the president himself. The missive features a Trumpian mix of non sequiturs, braggadocio, insults, flattery, and half-truths. Whether the dramatic letter marks the end of the current process or is simply a negotiating feint, it matches the soap-operatic series of events that preceded it. Either way, it displays the ongoing conflict between Trump’s desire for pageantry and credit and his longstanding dictum that one must be willing to walk away from the negotiating table.

The Americans and the North Koreans were all set for a historic meeting. Then they started talking about Libya.

Of all the countries that might have acted as a spoiler for the summit in Singapore between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un—China, Russia, Japan, the United States and North Korea themselves—the one that doomed it was unexpected. It isn’t even involved in North Korea diplomacy and is locateda long 6,000 miles away from the Korean Peninsula. It’s Libya.

Yet Libya ought to have been top of mind. It’s notoriously difficult to determine what motivates the strategic choices and polices of North Korea’s leaders, but among the factors that has been evident for some time is Kim Jong Un’s fear of ending up like Muammar al-Qaddafi. The Libyan strongman was pulled from a drainage pipe and shot to death by his own people following a U.S.-led military intervention during the Arab Spring in 2011. The North Korean government views its development of nuclear weapons—a pursuit Qaddafi abandoned in the early 2000s, when his nuclear program was far less advanced than North Korea’s, in exchange for the easing of sanctions and other promised benefits—as its most reliable shield against a hostile United States that could very easily inflict a similar fate on Kim. We know this because the North Korean government has repeatedly said as much. “The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Gaddafi regime in Libya could not escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up nuclear programs of their own accord,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency observed in 2016.

A short—and by no means exhaustive—list of the open questions swirling around the president, his campaign, his company, and his family.

President Trump speculated on Tuesday that “if” the FBI placed a spy inside his campaign, that would be one of the greatest scandals in U.S. history. On Wednesday morning on Twitter, the “if” dropped away—and Trump asserted yesterday’s wild surmise as today’s fact. By afternoon, a vast claque of pro-Trump talkers repeated the president’s fantasies and falsehoods in their continuing project to represent Donald Trump as an innocent victim of a malicious conspiracy by the CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice.

The president’s claims are false, but they are not fantasies. They are strategies to fortify the minds of the president’s supporters against the ever-mounting evidence against the president. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz show in their new book about impeachment, an agitated and committed minority can suffice to protect a president from facing justice for even the most strongly proven criminality.

In excusing his Arrested Development castmate’s verbal abuse of Jessica Walter, the actor showed how Hollywood has justified bad behavior for generations.

“What we do for a living is not normal,” Jason Bateman said in Wednesday’s New York Times interviewwith the cast of Arrested Development, in an effort to address his co-star Jeffrey Tambor’s admitted verbal abuse of Jessica Walter. “Therefore the process is not normal sometimes, and to expect it to be normal is to not understand what happens on set. Again, not to excuse it.” As Hollywood continues to grapple with widespread revelations of hostile work environments, institutional sexism, and sexual misconduct on and off set, Bateman insisted that he wasn’t trying to explain away an actor’s bad behavior—while displaying, over and over, exactly how his industry does it.

Bateman’s glaring mistake in the interview—for which he has already apologized—is how he rushed to defend Tambor from Walter’s account of Tambor screaming at her on the set of Arrested Development years ago. In doing so, Bateman defaulted to every entrenched cultural script of minimizing fault, downplaying misbehavior, and largely attributing Tambor’s verbal harassment to the unique, circumstantial pressures of acting—a process, he suggested, most onlookers could not hope to understand.

As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”

The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

The bombastic legal adviser to Stormy Daniels is taking cues from the era of O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky.

On cable news these days, there are very few people who have approached President Trump’s ubiquity. In fact, there is only one, and his name is Michael Avenatti. (Stormy who?)

Avenatti is not the first attorney to understand how the publicity game is played. Litigators are often like this: brash, aggressive, and sophisticated media manipulators. But Avenatti is the first celebrity lawyer of the Trump age, and it’s for that reason that he has become ultra-famous: Everything to do with Trump becomes, for good or ill, a star. And so it is with Avenatti, who in the public imagination has become not just “Stormy Daniels’s lawyer Michael Avenatti,” but simply “Michael Avenatti,” and appears to live inside your TV set.

The billionaire’s Twitter tirade was so ill-informed it led to a subtweet from his former head of communications.

Elon Musk’s screed against the media began with a story about Tesla.

“The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them,” the entrepreneur tweeted Wednesday, with a link to a post on the website Electrek. The author of that post criticized news coverage of recent Tesla crashes and delays in the production of the Model 3, calling it “obsessive” and saying there’s been a “general increase of misleading clickbait.”

Musk followed that tweet with an hours-long tirade in which he suggested that journalists write negative stories about Tesla to get “max clicks” and “earn advertising dollars or get fired,” blamed the press for the election of President Donald Trump, and polled users on whether he should create a website that rates “the core truth” of articles and tracks “the credibility score” of journalists, which he would consider naming Pravda, like the Soviet state-run, propaganda-ridden news agency.